Eleven residents from the Charlotte area staged a “die-in” protest on an overcast Wednesday afternoon outside the Duke Energy Corp. (NYSE:DUK) headquarters on South Tryon Street.

The activists, billing themselves as members of Charlotte Environmental Action, mostly wore black and sprawled themselves on the brick sidewalk as if they were dead.

Placed in the middle of the bodies was a pile of coal and a plastic jug filled with water. Two members — Kate Fulbright and Antoine James — held up a banner that read “Duke Energy, Coal Ash Is Poisoning Our Water.”

“The expectation is not to get arrested,” said James Stewart Jr., one of the group’s organizers. “The expectation is to raise awareness about how coal ash is poisoning our river.”

Charlotte Environmental Action's protest lasted less than an hour, with no arrests.

Coal ash ponds at Riverbend Steam Station on the Catawba River are upstream from Mountain Island Lake, the source of most of the drinking water for the Charlotte area.

In a statement, a Duke Energy official said there is no drinking water pollution in the Charlotte region from coal ash. Monitoring near Charlotte's drinking water intake downstream of Riverbend consistently finds arsenic, chromium, selenium and other trace elements to be less than 1 part per billion, said Erin Culbert, Duke spokesperson. "This is less than the lowest amount lab instruments can measure and is well below surface water standards."

Riverbend is now being decommissioned, Culbert added. The multi-year process will result indeconstructing the plant and effectively closing its two ash basins. "This provides the ultimate resolution to ash basin concerns," she said.

Culbert said Duke has complied diligently with its water discharge permit. "We have been monitoring water quality in Mountain Island Lake since the 1950s, and data continually demonstrate water quality is good, fish are healthy and drinking water supplies are safe," she said.